I hope this forum is helpful & friendly to newbies unlike a couple of others. I started off leaving XP for Zorin. The guys on the forum were a great help & very patient. Unfortunately some bugs / hardware incompatibility made me need to look for another distro. I have ended up with Sabayon Gnome3 because, well, it just works as it says on the box

My problem is though, something went wrong during the 1st install & during the updating it crashed, so I had to renistall. Now I have a LVM setup & haven't got a clue. I usually have 3 partitions - /, /home, /swap. This means I can access the home folders from LiveCD & reinstall just / partition if needed. I can see those partitions under LVM but from LiveCD all it sees is a 500mb drive (my drive is 240Gb.

Home is backed up with Deja Dup. How do I sort my drive so I can access as above? Not had time to get into Terminal commands or to understand the Gentoo / Sabayon way yet as being confident that it is set up right is my main priority.

the reason why you can't see your HOME-partition (I assume that you can't see the other partitions either) is that the Volume Group is not active. You can activate them by doing the following either as root or by using sudo:

well unfortunately I forgot the part about mounting the drive, this is a necessary first step I hadn't thought about. Please forgive me

There are two ways you can preserve your HOME-data.

1. Make a complete backup of your personal data in /home (see * below) [Which you should do in any case!], then do a fresh install, finally copy back all the files into the new HOME-partition, again making a 'just-in-case' backup of the newly created config-files in the new HOME-partition. Basically these are all the in directories beginning with a dot .

Under Linux files or directories with a dot at the beginning are hidden from the default view (like the ~ under Windows). So examples in your HOME-partition would be .kde (In case you have KDE applications installed), or .config. When using a graphical file manager like Nautilus or Dolphin you will probably have to activate the display of hidden file in the menu, when in a terminal the following when you want to be shown the contents of a directory like you /home folder (example from my computer):

The ~ right before the command prompt $ tells you that you are in your /home-directory. If unsure, use the pwd command (stand for present working directory if I remember correctly) which will tell you currenlty location in the file system.

The option -a of the ls command makes it show the hidden file, the option -l gives you extended information of the files and folders contained in the directory. Listings of directories begin with a lower-case d as the first letter of the permissions settings, for example:

BTW: I understood that you are quite new to Linux, that's why I try to explain the steps in detail. In case you already know this, just ignore it!

2. Again, make a complete backup of your personal data in /home. When at the partitioning stage of the installation process, reuse the old HOME-partition as the new HOME-partition of your new install and UNCHECK the box 'format the partition' in the dialogue asking you what you want to use the partition for, size, file system, etc.!!! I myself have never done this, so I can't tell whether this leaves your old configuration files intact. Consequently I strongly advise you to back up your data to an external drive before re-installing, better save than sorry. Besides, shit happens.

(*) side note: Tools for doing an automated backup of your /home are for example: luckybackup, bacula, backintime as GUI applications. There are others as well, in addition to command line tools like simply copying all files and directories recursively or doig a byte by byte copy via the dd command. I'm not going into this here.